No. of Recommendations: 5
so what you had was two things happening that totally washed away the Southern Strategy, the Harry Dent-type southern strategy. And that is…That whole strategy was based - although it was more sophisticated than a Bilbo or a George Wallace - it was nevertheless based on coded racism. The whole thing. Busing. We want a supreme court judge that will not bus. Anything you'd look at could be traced back to the race issue and the old Southern strategy. And it was not done in a blatantly discriminatory way. But the Reagans did not have to do a Southern strategy for two reasons: Number one, race was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been “Southern issues” since way back in the 60s. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the economics and on national defense, the whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference.
Because Lee Atwater would totally go out to a lib reporter and just bare his evil raaaacist soul.
Actually, he did exactly that, but you make one HUGE MONGOLOUSELY mistake, you assume Lee Atwater is racist. He's a strategist. If you follow your own paragraph above, they are getting "abstract" with busing, and so by Reagan, it's very anstract. "Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 presidential general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The choice of location and his speech, which emphasized "states' rights," have been widely interpreted as a tacit appeal to Southern white voters who were part of the "Southern Strategy" of the Republican party.
The location was particularly significant and controversial because Philadelphia, Mississippi, was the site where three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered by local Ku Klux Klan members in 1964.
In his speech at the fair, Reagan stated: "I believe in states' rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment".
Critics at the time and historians since have pointed out that "states' rights" was a well-known code phrase (or "dog whistle") for opposition to federal civil rights legislation and racial integration. While some commentators have argued that the intention was simply to appeal to rural Southern voters generally, many observers familiar with the context understood the message as a nod to racial bias.
Oct 10, 2024 — Richard Nixon used phrases like “silent majority,” “states' rights,” and “law and order” to deliver this racially infu...
Smith College
"And Atwater wasn’t done yet. A few years later, he worked on the campaign of the first George Bush, and was quite successful in rousing up the racist base with the infamous Willie Horton ad — which may have been responsible for completely turning the election around in favor of his candidate.
In 2005, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman even apologized to the NAACP for his party’s history of exploiting the Southern Strategy — a history that was not yet over, and indeed is still not today."
We know y'all are totally invested in lying about your racism, and are so invested you can't ever admit to it. We never expect an honest conversation in this area from you, and you exceed our expectations famously.
My favorite Lee Atwater quote:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”" Lee Atwater - 1981
